Milestone 3

Alright!!!! These past couple of days has been really hectic, because my group member Joel and I needed to create a Joomla! module by today and we only had about a week and a half. It was super hard in the beginning because we both had no php experience and we didn't really know how and where to start. But looking back now, we both learned something very valuable, and I think we both can create Joomla! Modules pretty easily now. There were many sources we had to go through but mainly the book we had helped us the most. The resources we used can be found here.

What we followed to create our Joomla! Module was the UseCaseActivity. The Admin and User will "follow" these steps to post, accept, answer, do..... on the website. As you can see, the UseCaseActivity is very very very long, and the user and admin has many steps that they go through to just post and accept things. So, did we finish all of it... I wish!!! BUT the amount that Joel and I did so far is pretty good from starting with no experience.

To finish what we have, Joel and I split up the creation of the module. Joel took what was the Admins Back End and I took what was the User Front End.

So, to see what I did here are some pictures:




When the user logs in and navigates to the Activities/Events tab, This is what they will see. Now events posted by the admin has a "type" field where they select either Action or Event for the Activity. Then on the Front-End they will be filtered to their respectable spots under their type. And the user could choose to do an action or attend an event.

Actions are simple things around the dorm room or campus. The user/participant, I should say, could change a light bulb in the room or on campus (if allowed by the school).

Events are things such as a convention or concert.



When the user decides to choose one of the events, they will see this page. For now I did not make the event very descriptive, but the user will mostly see description of the event, what they have to do, and things that could be learned such as the video above.

To display these two pages the admin would post events on this page:



And for the two pages I created, they grab that information from the Joomla Database which is in the next picture.




Now for those of you who want to use a CMS, learning some SQL will help you a lot also.

The hard part of splitting up in this Milestone was how we both named things differently from the book that we used. And at one point it took me over a day to figure out why something was not displaying, and it was just because the database had a different name. So, when separating the workload, have some kind of structure or naming.

OK, so this is what I have done and if you read Joel's Blog, you can see what we have done. There are a lot of things that still need to be done on the UseCaseActivity, But I think we can do it. I just hope I don't switch from Joomla! because it has been a really great CMS to me, unlike the other on I worked on....